


Fallen

by Jenwryn



Category: Death Note
Genre: Alternate Universe, Angst, F/F, Friendship, Genderswap
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-28
Updated: 2009-12-28
Packaged: 2017-10-05 09:24:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,607
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/40157
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Jenwryn/pseuds/Jenwryn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>[girl!Matt x Misa]</p><p>Mello makes sure that Matt put away for safe-keeping, at the same time as Misa is placed in confinement by Near. And Matt hates him for it. AU (canon has <strike>obviously</strike> been screwed with).</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fallen

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Zeda](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=Zeda).



> I keep feeling the vague need to apologise for this story and yet, to be honest, I found it really interesting to write, so there you go – it just goes to show that I ought to post things straight away, instead of getting distracted by life and computer games, oh my. Anyway! This is [Strawberry Shortcake](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Strawberry_Shortcake). This is [The Final Countdown](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tt_ro2aerQg). And, if you haven't seen _Star Trek (2009)_ yet, you are sorely missing out. XD;
> 
> Most importantly, though, this is for Zeda, who is a wonderful friend. ♥

Her eyes are half closed, when the door opens for a second time. Matt hears the slight sound of it, though, and looks up because, seriously, if it's Near, she's going to find a way to disembowel him, even if she has to use the sheer power of her mind to do it. Or maybe even a bottle opener. And if it's _Mello_, well, good god; Matt can't even being to _think_ of all the horrid things she's going to do, if it's Mello. But it isn't Mello, and neither is it Near. It's Amane Misa, the girl who Matt had been forced to get to know so well (the girl who, Matt had joked, was sharing wardrobe tips with Mello) but whom she had, of course, never actually met. Well, except for that one day, when Matt had grown sick of the weather and had ended up in the same café, but that's past history.

Today Amane is wearing a huge coat and a petulant expression, and she has that Japanese policeman with her; Mogi. Matt does a mental calculation of the date and wonders whether Near has seen fit to pluck the girl away from her Great Hour. The blonde – and _surely_ the carpet simply cannot match the drapes in her case – is certainly dressed for it, Matt thinks. She lets her gaze lurk the space between Amane's boots and Amane's skirt. Nice.

“Dumped you in the green room too, then?” Matt drawls, and twirls her cigarette between two fingers.

Amane blinks, then her face brightens instantly, as if she were the Pavlov dog's of the smiling world. Her lips do this thing, though, after a second or two of looking at Matt – this concentrated little quirk, as though she's trying to remember something that is doing its very best to elude her.

Matt leans back against the sofa and crosses her legs, annoyed at the world but amused by the woman walking towards her. How is it that the actress dresses worse than a Mafia slut, but still manages to have the mien of Strawberry Shortcake?

“You,” says Amane, then, her eyes bright as she drops her handbag onto the coffee table, and flings herself down onto the couch beside Matt, with a flurry of boots and thigh. Her voice is high with surprise. “I know you, you paid for my coffee that time.”

It's true, but Matt winces slightly. That afternoon had been a momentary lapse of judgement, brought on by too-cold toes and, just possibly, the pink in Amane's cheeks. She really hadn't thought that the woman would actually _remember_ – after all, surely people did that kind of thing for her all the time, what with her being bloody famous and all. God. To make it just that little worse, Matt is pretty sure that everything said in these rooms will indubitably be heard by Near, the little voyeur, and so will presumably get back to Mello, too. But then Matt remembers, for the umpteenth time, that she's pissed with Mello, and so what's one more cock-up to add to the list? After all, he clearly doesn't think she's capable. That's why she hates him, right at this moment, the self-righteous shit – because he's out there, somewhere, prepping himself to play martyr whilst she's, what?, stuck here in some snotty hotel, simply because she's a girl? Because she's a girl, and his friend, and he feels as though he has the right, the fucking _right_, to play god to her?

Probably that's why Matt nods. Because she's aching. Because she wants to rip someone's head off. Because her cigarettes are running low and she isn't sure that Near will indulge her need for new ones. Because her concern for the boy – the boy she has to keep reminding herself that she hates – is chewing away at her veins like rats on wiring. Probably that's why she nods, and says, “Yeah, I remember that day. It was raining. You were cute, in a bedraggled kind of way.”

Mogi, the quiet policeman, shifts at the peripheries of Matt's vision, apparently uncomfortable. Anyone would think that he's never seen a girl give another girl the kind of appraising glance that Matt is giving the blonde. Well, and maybe he never _has_ seen such a thing, come to think of it. Matt doesn't care, frankly. Matt doesn't even bother looking at him, doesn't deign to; maybe he's one of the good guys now, but he'd still worked for Yagami. Perhaps he's brighter than he seems, though, because he doesn't say a word, simply wanders over to the window and stares, in a busy kind of way, out at the street below.

As for Amane, she shifts flawlessly from surprised, to surprised-and-pleased. “You never told me your name,” she says, and now she's glancing at a mirror and checking her hair, and now she's tugging at the hem of her tiny skirt, and now she's looking at Matt so _needingly_, so wide-eyed, as though she knows more than she'll ever admit she knows – and just a corner, just a tiny, tiny corner, of Matt's anger, melts into empathising pity.

“Matt,” she says. “I'm Matt.”

Amane beams. “I'll be engaged soon,” she declares, with a voice like bubbles. “We'll throw a party; you should come, Matt.”

“Right,” replies Matt, and exhales smoke. It's Amane's guy out there, isn't it? And, okay, so maybe he's a meglomaniacal bastard, and maybe Matt has been known to lay awake at night considering all the stuff she could do to him (_thanks ever so much for ruining my life, dickhead; let me show you all the shiny creative things those wankers in the Mafia taught me_) – but Amane is clearly stupid enough to be in love with him.

Maybe even stupid enough, actually, to believe that he loves her back.

Yeah. Exactly.

Matt inhales, dragging the life from her cigarette with every languid tug of her lungs. She knows what it's like, to be bound to a crazy bastard. Bound to a crazy bastard, because you care.

“There are drinks,” she says, “in the corner.”

And now Amane is nodding, cheerful from one side of her face to the other, as if she hadn't just been plucked away from the world by some short-arsed white kid. Maybe this is how the girl copes, or maybe she really is simply stupid, but either way she doesn't deserve the bitch-slap that Misa's fingers are suddenly itching to gift her with.

Night becomes day, and day becomes night, and the three of them are stuck in these rooms, as though they're a universe unto themselves. Like a spaceship, perhaps. Matt cracks _Star Trek_ jokes and expounds her theory about the various levels of hotness created by different combinations of Kirk, Spock and Uhura. Mogi's ears flare red. Misa talks about how she'll be with Yagami (and living in fields of daisies and buttercups, presumably), “when all of this is over.” Mogi stares out the window. Matt wishes they had a television, a PS3, anything, anything at all to keep herself occupied. She keeps a row of matchsticks on the coffee table, counting out the days, and feels like some kind of chain-smoking posh prisoner.

And maybe Near is watching, and maybe he isn't, and maybe Mello is still alive and being badass without her, and maybe he isn't. Either way Matt nurses her resentment towards the both of them. She watches Misa brush her hair. She smokes endless packs of cigarettes. (A large supply box materialises by the door, and then she loves the albino as much as she loathes him; she requests forgiveness, from a security camera, for that one time, when they were kids, and she'd helped Mello replace all of Near's clothes with Teletubby pyjamas).

There are no clocks, but sometimes Matt fancies – late at night, or watching Misa paint her toes whilst wearing nothing but her underwear or less (Matt would almost feel sorry for Mogi, if she could bring herself to care; besides, at least it's answered the Great Mystery of whether the woman was born blonde) – that she can hear the ticking of one inside her own head. _Oh, it's the final countdown_. She'd always found that song vaguely annoying.

Amane grumbles at the cigarette smoke, and complains that it will ruin her complexion. Matt trails a finger down Amane's back, slowly, slowly, and the blonde shivers into silence.

One evening a note appears, an envelope, placed on the table where Matt had been keeping her matches. The matches are gone, spirited away, but the letter is there in their place. It's an A4 sheet with nothing but _I am sorry_ on it. Nothing but that, and Mello's rosary in the folds of the paper.

Mello's fucking rosary.

The note is typed, so Matt can't be sure who wrote it, but the sickening silence reeks of Near.

Amane asks what it means, her nail-file paused on her thumb, her eyes wide and curious. Matt holds the rosary to her cheek and says it means that she's fucked, they're all fucked, fucked right up the arse with a wooden spoon. Mogi gnaws at his lip, and Amane watches in silence as Matt finishes what's left of the vodka on her own.

Matt doesn't even like drinking, but the black is better than the alternative.

She doesn't bother with the matchsticks anymore. It's too late to start over, now.

Mostly, she sleeps.

Then Mogi vanishes. Matt doesn't know when, she just knows that she wakes to find her head on Misa's lap, the policeman gone, and a television left in his place. A huge motherfucker of a television, and a pile of newspapers. That's when Matt knows that Kira has been defeated; she doesn't even need to look at the headlines, to know it. She knows that it means that Near has won. She knows that it means that at least Mello's death hasn't been in vain – knows that at least Mello, stupid pretty fucking Mello, would believe that his death had achieved something. He would believe that, Matt knows, even if she can't bring herself to feel it.

The redhead takes a moment, in Mello's honour, to reduce her plan of disembowelling Near to simply cutting off his balls (it's not as though he uses them, anyways, unless that poker-faced bitch, who'd always been sniffing after Mels, really does have a thing for the young ones). And then the world drops away from beneath her feet and there is no floor, there is no room, there is no nothing, nothing, nothing, and she doesn't hate Mello any more, she doesn't, she only wishes she could punch him because it would mean that he were here to punch.

Matt's hand is shaking, when she pours herself another glass of something that would probably double as paint-stripper. The bottle slips and falls to the floor. It doesn't break. It pours wet against her feet. Matt holds the glass with both hands, and lets the liquid burn into her mouth. Nothing left, then. Nothing more. It's over. Enough.

And Amane, Amane is still and listless on the couch, a glass in her hand, too. She's watching some soapie that she clearly isn't even seeing. There's a newspaper, crumpled up at her feet; _Kira_ can be seen in block print. Matt studies her and tries to see the woman sitting there; tries to see the woman she'd met in the rain, that day, and had bought coffee for. The pretty, pretty woman, and not the girl who has belonged to a now-dead Kira. Matt doesn't think that Amane likes women in particular, the way that Matt does, but Matt also thinks that the blonde simply likes to be liked.

There's another thing she has in common with Mello, then.

Matt remembers how much the girl had smiled, how her hands had cradled the coffee. Those same hands seem unsteady, now, on the glass of spirits.

Matt puts her own glass down, crookedly. A little spills, running over clear of the table and down onto the crumpled headline. The paper whispers to itself at the dripping pressure.

And maybe Near is watching, and maybe he isn't, but Matt doesn't really give a shit anymore either way. She puts her hand on Amane's knee and knows that she was right about at least one thing – the blonde is starved for touch. Her whole leg moves, trembles, beneath Matt's palm. Yagami must have noticed. Yagami must never have cared. Or maybe Yagami was simply even more of a wanker than Matt had ever thought because, yeah, maybe Amane isn't as brilliant as someone from Wammy's, but she's cute, and she's hot, and she _shivers_ at the ghosting of a finger towards her her hemline.

She _shivers_, and the floor has fallen out from beneath Matt's feet.

Amane doesn't say a thing, simply blinks, when Matt unbuttons the dress that the blonde is wearing, and trails wet kisses against the pale of her breasts.

“I'll be seeing him soon,” the actress mumbles. She's put her own glass down, now, and has her hand in Matt's hair. Her breath smells of alcohol, but then, so does Matt's. “Light. I'll be seeing him. He loves me. He does. He's going to marry me. Soon.” She has tears on her face.

Matt laughs, bitter, hysterical. The world is so fucking hilarious, so fucking— one big cosmic cock-up, that's life. Matt puts her hand up Matt's skirt and thinks that maybe the woman isn't as stupid as she acts (Matt can't make up her mind; Amane is a riddle wrapped in a Barbie doll), if at least she knows to take what she can get. Or perhaps Matt simply sucks at surveillance. Whatever. The blonde is looking at her with huge sad eyes, and is rocking against Matt's hand.

“He's dead,” Matt says, but the actress isn't listening.

“He does love me,” Amane is saying. “He does.”

Matt wades through the layer of brightness that the drink has left on her brain, and reaches the conclusion that that doesn't really require an answer, not when she's already pushed the Amane's knickers to one side; not when she already has her fingers inside of her. Not when Amane is sitting there, mouth open, eyes open, gazing at Matt as though she can't actually see her, but can't see anything else, either. So Matt sucks at the blonde's throat and pushes her down against the sofa. Matt makes her moan, and Matt takes her revenge; takes her revenge on the world and on Kira and on Near and on Amane herself. Takes it the only way she can, with tongue and hands and the very brush of her hair against skin – takes it until Amane is naked and crying, crying tears for a crumpled newspaper on the floor, even as her lips are shaping out Matt's name, groaning, shouting, her hands clutching to leave bruises. Matt can see the desire and the shock in the way that the blonde is holding her body, holding herself until she comes; hard, shuddering, shattering, every fragment of her clinging to Matt. Matt doesn't even have to ask. Matt knows that no-one has ever made the blonde scream and mean it. Matt knows that Yagami-fucking-Light sure never did. And that's all Matt needs, that's all she needs, as she wipes her mouth on her discarded t-shirt, and reaches for another cigarette.

Misa lays there, and watches her smoke.

It's all over; the war has been won, the war has been lost, and victory tastes sour on Matt's lips.


End file.
